Been in a job for four years? This insurance giant says it's time to consider a move

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Rob Falzon has spent nearly his entire career at one company, but that hasn't kept him from trying — and succeeding in — six different roles.

Most recently the chief financial officer of Prudential Financial, Falzon transitioned in December to the role of vice chairman and will join the insurance giant's board of directors in August. In his new role, he oversees the finance, risk, investments, actuarial, communications, information & technology, and corporate social responsibility functions at the Newark, New Jersey-headquartered company.

I sat down with Falzon to discuss how he and Prudential are tackling — and embracing — technological innovation, how the nature of the CFO role has changed over time, and why people at Prudential tend to change roles about as frequently as U.S. presidential elections.

Below are excerpts from the conversation.

From your vantage point, how is technology changing the nature of work in financial services?

If you think about the spectrum of things that finance is involved in, we've gone from a function that was primarily viewed as being a vertical to one that is primarily viewed as being a horizontal. What do I mean by that? On one end, the vertical end of it, would be the reporting and recording aspects of it. That piece has historically been the emphasis for finance, and what's evolved over the last several years is that the other end of that spectrum — I think of it as conceptualization and execution strategy — has become much more important.

That has implications in talent, it has implications in technology, and it has implications on organizational design.

We now have things that we consider to be critical roles, and we have things that we consider to be pivotal roles.

Critical roles are all the things that we were doing on the left end of that spectrum — the operating and the reporting functions. Critical ones are ones that if we do really well, we're going to safeguard the company. Pivotal roles are ones more toward the strategic end, and if we do those really well, it actually has a strategic impact on the success of the company: It may enhance revenues, it may enhance profitability, it may help make informed decisions with regard to strategy.

With regard to technology, as we think about it, the demands are coming really on the pivotal roles. So we in finance need to shift resources out of the critical roles and into the pivotal roles, and the only way we can really do that — absent just hiring a ton more people — is to take the things that we're doing on the critical side and enable those with technology. And incidentally, they're the roles that are most well suited to things like automation, even things like artificial intelligence.

So technology is allowing you to take your workforce and have a lower percentage of it allocated to what are still critical functions, but with technology you need fewer people doing that, which frees them up to then spend time on those pivotal functions.

Eventually will every role in finance require technological knowledge or skill?

I think ultimately every role is going to be impacted by technology. We're on the very front end of that. We're in the conceptualization stage of the idea that you want every individual in the organization to be being trained in digital and actually monitoring that — having self-assessment tools that will tell them how much progress they're making.

If you look at the areas that, early on, are being impacted by it, it's all the things that are touching the customer. Where we're really deploying technology is at the top of the funnel, where we have 25 million customers. Our opportunity is pulling those customers down to that funnel. That's the low-hanging fruit; that's the opportunity to use technology to dramatically expand revenues.

We want to use technology to save on costs as well, and we're doing that, but the impact of expanding our customer base versus the impact of saving on cost — the customer end of it is going to be exponentially more powerful.

Do you replace or re-skill employees as you need more technology-minded talent?

You have to re-skill your employees. There's just not enough talent out there to hire. Corporations are left with no choice but to do the development.

All corporations are going to need to view re-skilling as their primary responsibility, or they're not going to make the transition.

We're also working with institutions like Rutgers, which is located in Newark, where we're headquartered, on bringing industry into the classroom and helping that to inform the curriculum. These people not only need to understand Excel, they need to understand Tableau when they come out. Those are now table stakes.

Your tenure as CFO had more strategic impact on Prudential than the traditional view of the role would imply. How has the nature of the CFO role changed over time?

I talked earlier about the critical roles and the pivotal roles. We went through a period of time where the control functions — critical roles — really drove finance and therefore drove leadership of finance.

What you've seen over time is that that has now shifted to the pivotal roles. So as you think about the role of finance on a go-forward basis, it creates more opportunities for the talent to have more fun — because through our mobility programs we expose them to a diversity of roles and experiences — and it creates a wider net of people that you're looking to attract into finance. I think a broader trend that you're seeing across industries is that increasingly, the role of the CFO as well as her or his finance organization is toward those pivotal roles.

You mentioned a mobility program. How does it work?

We look at every individual who's been in a role for four or more years and we ask, is it time to move them? We're very disciplined about it.

We find that it's rewarding from their standpoint, and it creates more career optionality for them in the future.

We also found that as we were looking for succession in leadership, we were seeing a lot of people who were very narrowly developed. From a leadership standpoint, that's not going to work — you need diversity of experience as you ascend.

So we became very conscientious about forcing this mobility, as a way to develop optionality for us as well as for our employees.

What's your take? Weigh in with your own experience and ideas below.